The Stone Monkey

could move easily.
    At the site of the explosion Sachs used her blunt knife to scrape residue from the outwardly curled metal. She placed some of the black ashy material into a plastic bag, sealed it and put that in the mesh collection bag.
    She looked at the dark windows of the bridge forty feet away. Okay, Rhyme, here we go. They swam toward it.
    And the pressure gauge gave her its emotionless message: 2350 pounds.
    At 500 they left the bottom. No exceptions.
    Because the ship was on its side the bridge door now opened upward, toward the surface. It was metal and very heavy. The two Coast Guard officers struggled to lift it and Sachs swam through the opening and down into the bridge. They lowered the door into the closed position. Itclanked shut with a chilling boom and Sachs realized that she was now trapped inside the ship. Without her companions she probably couldn’t open the door herself.
    Forget it, she told herself, reached up to the light mounted on her wetsuit hood and clicked it on. The beam offered her faint comfort. She turned and swam away from the bridge down a dark corridor that led to the cabins.
    Faint motion too from the dimness. Coming from what? Fish, eels, squid?
    I don’t like this, Rhyme.
    But then she thought about the Ghost searching for the Changs, about the baby, Po-Yee, the Treasured Child.
    Think about that, not about the darkness or confinement. Do this for her, for Po-Yee.
    Amelia Sachs swam forward.
    •   •   •
    She was in hell.
    No other word described it.
    The black hallway was filled with sooty debris and refuse, scraps of cloth, paper, food, fish with piercing yellow eyes. And overhead, a shimmering, like ice: the thin layer of air trapped above her. The sounds were harrowing: the scraping and groaning, moans. Squeals like human voices in agony, pings and snaps. The clank of metal on metal.
    A fish, gray and sleek, darted past. She gasped involuntarily at the motion and turned her head to follow it.
    She found herself looking at two dull human eyes in a white lifeless face.
    Sachs screamed through her regulator and jerked back. The body of a man, barefoot, his arms above his head, like a perp surrendering, floated nearby. His legs were frozen in the position of a runner’s and, as the fish sped past, the small wake turned him slowly away from her.
    Clank, clank.
    No, she thought. I can’t do this.
    Already the walls were closing in on her. Plagued all her life by claustrophobia, Sachs couldn’t stop thinking of what would happen if she got caught in one of these tiny passages. She’d go mad.
    Two deep breaths of dry air through the regulator.
    She thought of the Chang family. She thought of the toddler.
    And she swam on.
    The gauge: 2300 pounds of pressure.
    We’re doing fine. Keep going.
    Clank .
    That damn noise—like doors closing, sealing her shut. Well, ignore it, she told herself. Nobody’s closing any doors.
    The rooms above her—on the side of the Dragon facing the surface—were not, she deduced, the Ghost’s: two didn’t appear to have been occupied on the voyage and one was the captain’s; in this one she found seafaring memorabilia and pictures of the bald, mustachioed man she recognized as Captain Sen from the pictures tacked up on Lincoln Rhyme’s wall.
    Clank, clank, clank . . .
    She swam downward to check out the rooms on the other side of the narrow corridor—facing the bottom.
    As she did, her tank caught on a fire extinguisher mounted to the wall and she froze in position. Trapped in the narrow corridor she was seized with a flash of panic.
    It’s okay, Sachs, Lincoln Rhyme’s voice said to her in that deep, lulling voice he always fell into when speaking to her through her headset at crime scenes. It’s okay.
    She controlled the panic and backed up, freeing herself.
    The gauge told her: 2100 pounds.
    Three of the cabins below her hadn’t been occupied. That left only one more—it had to be the Ghost’s.
    A huge groan.
    More clanks.
    Then a moaning so loud she actually felt it in her chest. What was happening? The whole ship was buckling! The doors would be jammed. She’d be trapped here forever. Suffocating slowly . . . Dying alone . . . Oh, Rhyme . . .
    But then the moaning stopped, replaced by more clanking.
    She paused at the entrance to the Ghost’s cabin, below her feet.
    The door was closed. It opened inward—well, downward. She gripped the knob and twisted. The latch released and the heavy wooden door eased